Web Hosting Hub Review

I received an invitation today (July 12,
2010) from Web Hosting Hub to try
out their hosting service and compare it to my current web hosting provider
(who shall remain nameless). There are a number of key features that I look
for. Note that this list is from memory, and I didn't check their list of
features before writing it.

My Non-Negotiable Requirements:

Very reasonable monthly rates (less than $10 per month, or $120 per
year)

Effectively unlimited bandwidth. I use a LOT of bandwidth every month
between my MP3s and video files, upward of several dozen gigabytes a day. I
used to bump up against bandwidth limits all the time with one former
provider. I'm not hosting pornography or objectionable content, just LOTS
of files and backups of configurations and files that I've archived but
might need again.

Effectively unlimited storage. With the 20GB or so of data on my site,
I'll want to know I never run out of room to store things now and in the
future.

Responsive 24/7 technical support via chat, email, and phone. When my
site is down, or if I run into an issue, I want to know my webhosting
company is aware of it pronto!

MySQL support. I want this either on the server I'm using, or else hosted
on a high-speed network.

*nix-based hosting. My stuff works best on Linux or UNIX... not on
Microsoft Windows.

Shell access. This is critical for me. I don't want just plain-old FTP...
I want an actual shell, where I can chown/chmod files in my hosting
directory, run scripts, and be able to manipulate files without having to
download and upload them constantly. Cron alone won't do; I've been a UNIX
admin for fifteen years and want my shell!

Support for Drupal, which requires the normal LAMP stack: Linux, Apache,
MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.

Satisfaction guarantee. I want to know I can easily get my money back if
it doesn't work out for some reason.

What Do You Want?

Now, obviously I know exactly what I want out of a hosting provider. If
you're new at this game, though, WHH provides a number of
guides to help you make your decision:

How
to choose a webhosting provider is an overview of things those of us in the
industry a long time know to look for. Company longevity, space and bandwidth,
customer service, and reliability are all really important to look at. If
you've outgrown your Blogger account or want more flexibility, configurability,
and tools for your web site, you should read this to help you figure out what
you're looking for. Of course, WHH scores high on the marks in its own
evaluation, but it's still a good read.

Is
Dedicated Hosting The Solution For You? is useful to help you evalute if
you really need all the power dedicated hosting provides. Because dedicated
hosting is so resource-inefficient, it's much more expensive than shared
hosting, but offers you almost unlimited configurability. I've been down that
route before, and while it's nice having the power at your fingertips, even for
me -- a bona-fide power-user -- it was more than what I needed and I eventually
went to a shared-hosting provider principally due to the price of dedicated
hosting.

Should
You Consider Windows Web Hosting? covers that age-old question: Linux or
Windows? This is a No-B.S. evaluation of the benefits and risks of both. It all
boils down to your application, as usual, and despite Web Hosting Hub being a
mostly Linux shop, they give Windows a fair shake here.

Let's dive in!

Now to figure out whether they're going to meet my needs as outlined above,
and have reasonable prices, to boot. I stepped through their signup pages.
Right on the front page, I found they hit some of my non-negotiable
requirements:

UNLIMITED Disk Space & Bandwidth -- a good sign!

UNLIMITED Websites -- Well, kind of expected in this day and age, but
positive.

FREE Domain Name -- Cool, that was a feature of my current hosting
provider that I'd forgotten about. I don't need it right now -- I already
have a domain I want to put on this, waywardsun.org -- but good to
know.

24/7 U.S. Technical Support -- OK, another "yay" point. Like most
Americans, I want my tech support to be competent in English.

Control Panel -- OK, cool if you're not me, gets a big "whatever", but
hopefully it has some good tools.

FREE premium Web Builder -- Meh.

90-Day FULL Money Back Guarantee -- I might be taking advantage of that
just for the purpose of this review!

I clicked through to the "See All
Features" link. And there it was: Drupal support, Blogging Tools, PHP5,
Python, Perl, cron jobs... OK. This looks like a pretty standard UNIX hosting
place now. Good, good sign. I kept going, though I didn't see "shell access"
anywhere on the list.

Well, my usual next step is "Is there a coupon?" I know, that probably
sounds weird, but one of the first things I look for is some sort of discount
available for the first time period after signup. With my current provider, it
was the first year for $20, subsequent years for $120 per year. Which is about
what I expect. How does WebHostingHub stack up? Well, after some Googling for
"WebHostingHub coupons", I found several affiliate deals that purpoted to offer
a discount, but in fact were trying to redirect your search to competing
service providers. Unable to find any further discounts, I decided to choose
the standard $4.95 a month deal using their regular signup.

I found an error that caused me some concern at the first signup page,
though. There was a grammatical error. It reads "All account include a FREE
domain registration or transfer!" As you probably know, "accounts" should be
plural. This is a fairly common mistake among non-native writers, though. It
got me thinking: where is this place hosted? The first thing I checked was the
IP address: 173.205.127.11. Running this through ARIN, the American Registry of
Internet Numbers, I found they were a US-hosted company working under the
InMotion Hosting netblock. OK, so they are in the US and it looks legit, based
in Wyoming.

What does this tell me? First, that they've been around for at least eight
years doing the same business: providing low-cost shared hosting.

Chatting Up The Sales Guy

I paged one of their sales engineers from their web site on chat to see how
well that worked. Within just a few seconds after submitting the form with my
question, a chat box popped up, and I had a sales engineer on the line ready to
answer my questions.

Matthew P. Barnson: I'm
evaluating your service and have some questions: Do you offer ssh shell access
to accounts? What operating systems do you use? Do you offer any month-to-month
plans, or only yearly plans?

You are now speaking with Brian of Sales.

Brian: Hello Matthew.

Matthew P. Barnson: Hi,
Brian. Nice to meet you!

Brian: We do not offer SSH as our account is shared
hosting.

Brian: s

Brian: We bill in 12, 24, and 36 month increments. 12
months is $83.40 at a $6.95 per month price point, 24 months is $142.80 at a
$5.95 per month price point and 36 months is $172.80 at a $4.95 per month price
point.

Matthew P. Barnson: And
what operating system are you running under the hood on the shared
accounts?

Brian: We run CentOS a Red Hat Enterprise on our
servers.

Matthew P. Barnson: Thanks,
Brian. You've been very helpful. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to
answer my questions. Have a good night!

Brian: My pleasure.

When you are ready to get signed up it is much faster to order over the
phone with us as all online orders are held up to 30 minutes for verification
and also we do call to confirm any order received through our website prior to
activating the account. Please feel free to give me a call at 1-877-595-4482,
or 757-416-6627 for international customers then option 9, then extension 878.
We can have you setup in 5 minutes and I can also address anymore questions you
may have. Or if easier you can contact me through chat by simply putting my
name into the question line of the chat.

Now, it's important to be aware of the rates. You get the special
introductory rate only for your initial signup. This is pretty typical of the
webhosting industry, but it's worth your time to check out the terms of
service.

The Devil Is In The Details

Web Hosting Hub's terms of service
are pretty standard. No pr0n, no spam, shared hosting means be a good citizen
and not hogging the CPU or memory. I found nothing out of the ordinary. But
it's really important that you be fully aware of what it is you're buying, and
what a "FULL Money-Back Guarantee" actually means:

You agree to subscribe annually for $107.40 per year after the expiration
of your initial promotional term. That puts them right at pretty much the
exact same price as my current webhosting provider. Credit where credit is
due: the company is very up-front about this recurring cost, and they
encourage you to sign up for three years so that your price is locked-in at
a very low rate for that term.

There are a number of services to which the 90-day money back guarantee
does not apply. I understand why this is, but if you're a newbie it's
really important to be aware of it. This includes SSL certificates, Free
Domain Names ($11.95 per name), Dedicated IP address fees, and a few more
things. If you sign up for the extras on your account, you're going to be
docked for those if you cancel before 90 days.

You'll get a pro-rated refund of your remaining hosting fees if you
cancel after the ninety days. If you were scared of the three-year
commitment to lock your price in at $4.95 a month, don't be. The refund
policy is right in the Terms of Service in black-and-white. A pro-rated
refund is a sign of a top-notch webhosting company that isn't afraid of the
competition.

If you sign up online, they are going to call you to confirm you are who
you say you are before they allow you to sign up. In my opinion, this is a
positive thing: it's a sign of a reputable business wanting to
make sure they are doing business with a real, live person on the other
end.

CONCLUSION

If you're looking for a web hosting provider with very decent fees, a solid
Internet connection , unlimited transfers, and a plethora of tools to help you
set up your site for a minimal time investment, WebHostingHub.com may be the
exact match you're looking for. They're very competitive with other services,
and offer a discount on 3-year paid-in-advance service that's really hard to
beat. They are also clearly offering an ethical service, are based in the USA,
and don't appear to have any hidden terms to surprise you.

On the other hand, if you already have a web provider with many of these
features who meets or beats the price -- or if you are a hard-core geek like me
who feels he absolutely needs shell access with any hosting provider -- you may
want to look elsewhere. In the end, the lack of shell access was the
deal-killer for me... but if you don't even know what a shell is, or if you can
live without one, WebHostingHub is definitely worth checking out.